euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

Apache2’s mod_deflate offers further efficiencies in the front-end page-performance of OXID eShops.  It uses the GZIP compression format, by which the server compresses the resource to be transmitted and the client/browser decompresses the same before presentation on screen.

To be measured are performance parameters of time and file-size.  We used the Google Developer Tools to make the following time measurements.

The measurements taken were the following resources:

• HTML Document
• Cascading Stylesheet Files
  • style.css
  • oxid.css
  • jquery.jcarousel.css
• Javascript Script Files
  • oxid.js
  • jquery.min.js
  • jquery.jcarousel.js
  • ga.js

Time Measurements for OXID eShop Resources using mod_deflate

In order to interpret this data it is important to understand the different columns in the table.  The “post” time values in Send and Revieve columns, from after mod_deflate was used in comparision with the “pre” values indeed are lower.  Nevertheless there are some cases where the values are indeed higher.

We will be making further performance measurements in the next days, not only the time-values but also the file-sizes and report them shortly here.

We look forward to your feedback and observations – or “Leave a Reply” below!

If you are constantly bewildered as to which browser your OXID eShop should support, you can use the nifty Statscounter Tool for getting the most current browser-usage statistics.

The below graph shows the splits of major browser-brands (taken for Germany for the months January to November 2011.

Particularly interesting is the falling share of Firefox (52.54% in Nov. 2011) and the rising share of Google Chrome (12.44% in Nov. 2011, up from ~8% at beginning of 2011).

This affirms that OXID Shop programmers factor in the functionality of the shops in at least 3 browsers, with 15% or higher market-share. Often requested by shop-merchants is Safari compatibility, of course both on MAC and Windows.

Very much in trend is also compatibility with the iPAD (Safari) browser, although we have noticed significant deviations of iPAD-Safari from the HTML standards (which keep getting fixed in newer versions of iOS).

If you are a shop-merchant, or shop-programmer, we’d love to hear about your browser-challenges and how you are overcoming them! Please drop us a comment..

If you are using special zoom-tools like Magic Zoom, you may have to make modifications to the integration module with OXID, so that the tool uses appropriate high-performance URL for loading media-content.

Fresh adopters of the OXID e-Commerce software will notice that the system is set to Productive Mode checked off.  Many wonder what this setting actually does.

The OXID e-shop allows extensive logging and debugging information if you are attempting to troubleshoot problems, or just wanting to gain better insight into the system.  A debug level between -1 and 7 can be set in the config.inc.php file.